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Two Issues, Three Levels So far, discussion has remained at the borders of Putnam’s original two-level games theory framework. Mayer (2010, 57), however, argues that policy making in the EU should be analysed as MLG, rather than two-level games. Indeed, Meunier (2000), for example, points out that the EU itself becomes an actor when it is negotiating with external partners such as the United States. “When the EU enters into trade negotiations with third countries, its fifteen member states have to reach a common position at the European level before it can be defended at the international level with a ‘single voice.’ Member states use several different rules to aggregate their divergent interests into this single voice” (103). For this thesis, the crucial question arising from the EU’s external negotiations is how to place them into Putnam’s original framework? Is the Doha Round the international stage that Putnam is speaking about? If the Doha Round and other similar external negotiations constitute the international stage (or Level I in Putnam’s notations) then what would the Community level negotiations be? Are they still international or are they domestic? Lee Ann Patterson (1997, 141), in order to address these problems, suggests using “an additional level of play, the Community level, in which member states attempt to achieve domestic goals while simultaneously pursuing cooperative integration.” In this sense, the EU can be conceptualized as a federal-like polity. Like national chief negotiators, the Commission with its staff is trying to maximize benefits and minimize costs (Woolcock 2010), at least to themselves, if not for the European Union and its member states as a whole. In short, domestic coalitions formed with the member states influence the EU’s agricultural policy. Community agricultural policy in turn affects world markets and supply chain configurations elsewhere. The world markets in turn have a huge influence on various stakeholders, particularly producers of agricultural products (but lately also environmental and 27